Evolution of an International Collaborative Student Project
Cary Laxer
Mats Daniels
Åsa Cajander
Michael Wollowski
Rose-Hulman Institute
of Technology
Terre Haute, IN, USA
Uppsala University
Uppsala, Sweden
Uppsala University
Uppsala, Sweden
Rose-Hulman Institute
of Technology
Terre Haute, IN, USA
cary.laxer@
rose-hulman.edu
mats.daniels@
it.uu.se
asa.cajander@
it.uu.se
michael.wollowski@
rose-hulman.edu
Keywords:
International
collaborative
projects,
computing and society, open-ended group projects, realworld problems
necessary skills to make them useful as quickly as
possible to the companies hiring them.
Fuller et al (Fuller, Amillo, Laxer, McCracken, and
Mertz 2005) showed that working on international
projects facilitated learning for computer science
students. The students should understand the needs of
the local communities in which their project results will
be used. However, in the past there has been little, if
any, opportunity for students to experience, and
overcome, language and cultural barriers that are
inherent in international collaborative projects
(Azadegan and Lu 2001).
Likewise, open-ended group projects facilitate
student learning by allowing the students to reflect on
and apply the fundamental computer science and
software engineering principles they have learned to a
larger, perhaps less well-defined, problem than they are
used to working on (Newman, Daniels, and Faulkner
2003). These projects “can contribute to the
development of professional and ‘social’ skills which
will be essential for their future careers” (Newman,
Daniels, and Faulkner 2003).
The work reported in this paper combines the desired
educational goals of both international collaborative
projects and open-ended group projects. The approach
strives to overcome the educational shortcomings of
international collaborative projects mentioned earlier
and tries to provide a richer educational experience for
the students.
1
2
Abstract
International collaborative student projects are
inherently difficult for everyone concerned – the
students working on the projects, the faculty guiding the
students, and the clients submitting the projects. With
more and more schools recommending, or even
requiring, that their students have some form of
international experience in their degree programs, these
projects will become more prevalent in helping to
educate computing students in the 21st century.
Understanding cultural differences between countries
helps students have a better appreciation for the global
aspects of computing and the issues faced in making
software work in an environment they are not used to.
This paper discusses the evolution over four years of
collaborative projects between computing students at
two schools, one in Sweden and one in the United
States. The projects are based in courses at both schools
that deal with computing in society. We discuss what the
faculty teaching the courses and guiding the projects
have learned and how they have improved the
experience, what the students learn through these
projects, and how the clients interact with the students
and faculty. Suggestions for further development of
these projects are also made.
Introduction
Computer scientists and software engineers face many
challenges with the projects they work on. The problems
they solve are mostly open-ended and team-based. More
and more frequently the projects are also international in
nature, with many multinational corporations using
around-the-clock approaches to getting problems solved.
The challenge to computer science educators is how to
get their students exposure to these types of problems
and experience in solving these types of problems, so
that when the students complete their degrees they are
able to join the professional workforce with the
Copyright © 2009, Australian Computer Society, Inc. This
paper appeared at the Eleventh Australasian Computing
Education Conference (ACE2009), Wellington, New Zealand,
January 2009. Conferences in Research and Practice in
Information Technology, Vol. 95. Margaret Hamilton and Tony
Clear, Eds. Reproduction for academic, not-for-profit purposes
permitted provided this text is included.
Method
The findings in this paper are based on us working as
reflective practitioners. The setting is two nontraditional courses and as such warrants attention in
order to better understand the created learning
environment. The authors have collected feedback using
several mechanisms: examination methods, course
evaluations, being part of the project process, and
discussions with colleagues. In addition, several faculty
colleagues interviewed students to find pedagogical
strengths and weaknesses and ways to improve the
course over several years. The actions and findings
presented in this paper are strongly influenced by the
authors’ active participation in the computing education
research community, as well as a continuing scholarly
interest in educational theories. The findings are
presented in a narrative form.
3
Background
The Department of Information Technology at Uppsala
University has offered a course titled “IT in Society”
(ITiS) since 1998. The overall goal of this course is to
provide an understanding of the interactions between
technology, users and designers. This involves
examining several types of interactions – between users,
between designer and user, between user and system,
between designer and system – and looking at how other
factors influence each interaction. It requires particular
attention to interactions between people and to the ways
in which technology influences them. For example, we
examine interactions between users and how those
interactions are affected by the computer systems
employed. An important goal of the course is to provide
a framework for, and experience in, evaluating social
and ethical issues in the use, or construction, of
technical products.
The course gives a brief theoretical exposé over areas
like organizational psychology and group dynamics, in
the context of interactions between users and the role of
technology in those interactions. The issues are
practiced in corporate projects with real work
environments. This course views system design in its
social context, showing how technical, psychological
and sustainability issues are important considerations in
system design, as are health and ethical issues. There is
a focus on how to make individual groups of four to
seven students function as well as how to structure
collaboration between these groups in a wider context.
Four years ago this wider context began to include
students from the Department of Computer Science and
Software Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of
Technology in the United States, enrolled in a course
titled “Computing in a Global Society.”
In this course, the Rose-Hulman students explore the
importance and relevance of globalization, especially as
it relates to computer science and software engineering.
Readings, such as “Globalization and Offshoring of
Software” (Aspray, Mayadas, and Vardi, 2006), and
seminars provide the mechanisms for exploring this
topic. Like the course at Uppsala University, there is a
focus on team dynamics and collaboration in a wide
context.
An open-ended group project serves as the primary
focus of the two courses, around which discussions and
lectures are centered. The project is performed for a
client external to both departments and has a clear
societal impact. For many students in the courses this
project is their first exposure to an open-ended
assignment of great magnitude. At first this poses a
daunting challenge for them. During the first class
meeting, when students were asked to introduce
themselves and tell what they hoped to learn from the
course, most students expressed apprehension about
what to expect from the course project. At the end of the
course most students had high regard for the experiences
they had and what they accomplished, and they clearly
indicated they learned a lot from the project and were
better equipped to handle such projects in the future.
Open-ended group projects enable students to reach
higher-order thinking skills (Hauer and Daniels 2008)
and it was clear the students in these courses achieved
those skills.
3.1
History of the Collaboration
In the fall of 2004 the Associate Dean of the Faculty at
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology was approached
by one of the authors (Daniels) at the Department of
Information Technology at Uppsala University about the
possibility of collaborating on a project that was to
investigate the feasibility of designing web-based
modules for improving Swedish health care
professionals’ abilities to interact with their patients.
The associate dean decided this project best belonged in
the Department of Computer Science and Software
Engineering and asked the department head (author
Laxer) if he was willing to pursue it. The two faculty
members involved knew each other professionally and
decided to attempt the collaboration. Neither department
had attempted a collaboration like this on an open-ended
project before (although Uppsala University has done
international collaborative projects that have been well
defined, such as the Runestone project (Daniels, Petre,
Almstrum, Asplund, Bjorkman, Erickson, Klein, and
Last, 1998, and Last, Daniels, Almstrum, Erickson, and
Klein, 2000)).
Students at Uppsala University would receive
academic credit for the project through the IT in Society
course, in which the project was based. The RoseHulman students would earn academic credit through a
Special Topics in Computer Science course. Since the
nature of this collaboration was unprecedented, student
participation at Rose-Hulman was invited – interested
students were asked to submit a short application essay
about why they were interested, what they hoped to get
out of the experience, and what they could contribute.
They were made aware that this was a new and
experimental course, and that the project was openended and not well-defined. Four students were chosen
for the initial collaboration.
The project was based at Uppsala University
Hospital, thus the main effort would be in Sweden. A
United States perspective on health care in the area of
patient interaction was desired, which is where the
Rose-Hulman students contributed. The research focus
was training of health care workers in patient
interaction, and the role of technology in patient
interaction solutions. The two sets of students
collaborated via e-mail and chat programs (such as
Skype).
Toward the end of the semester-long project, the four
Rose-Hulman students, along with their faculty member
and the associate dean, traveled to Sweden for a week of
interaction with their Swedish counterparts. The cost of
the trip was covered by funds from the Rose-Hulman
president, associate dean, and academic department. The
students made a presentation on the project to the IEEE
education workshop (CeTUSS) at Uppsala University,
worked on the project report, and presented the project
to the client. Although no software was written or
prototype developed, the feasibility study proved
successful and the client was very satisfied. The RoseHulman students also had a day of cultural activities,
allowing them to learn something about the country with
which they were collaborating.
For a first try, the collaboration was deemed
successful enough that a second collaboration the
following fall (2005) would be tried. The project that
year consisted of three pilot studies for a European
Union-wide project called SPEX (SPreading EXcellence
in health care); one of the pilot studies was located in
Sweden and based at the Uppsala University Hospital.
Academic credit was handled the same way at both
institutions as during the first year, and again four RoseHulman students were chosen to participate.
The SPEX project looked at ways that medical
expertise could be provided by specialists at centers of
excellence to general practitioners at points of care, with
the goal of reducing the transport costs and time for both
the patients and the doctors, as well as getting the
needed health care to the patients in a quicker manner.
Students were divided into teams, with each team
responsible for different facets of the project
(technology, information needs, cost, etc.). Each team
had a faculty advisor, chosen from among the faculty
involved in teaching the courses at each institution.
During that offering of the course students developed
some software and used some technology (digital pens
and explanograms (Pears and Erickson 2003), developed
at Uppsala University) to offer a proposed solution to
the project. The project was presented three times – to
an IEEE education workshop (CeTUSS) at Uppsala
University, to the client, and to a European Union-wide
conference on the project in Barcelona. This time two
Rose-Hulman students went to Sweden for a week and
the other two Rose-Hulman students joined several
students from Uppsala University, along with both
faculty members, in Barcelona for the final project
conference.
Once again the collaboration was considered
successful. The faculty committed to continuing the
collaboration, and at Rose-Hulman a decision was made
to formalize the project into a regularly offered elective
course, Computing in a Global Society (which hopefully
would attract more students). A decision was also made
to have the Rose-Hulman students make two trips to
Sweden during the project, one at the beginning of the
project and one at the end. Face-to-face meetings for
globally distributed teams are advocated in industry to
promote collaboration between remote counterparts
(Oshri, Kotlarsky, and Willcocks 2008); the faculty
thought increasing the face-to-face contact for the
students would thus be beneficial. The group of RoseHulman students would be split, with some traveling in
September and the others traveling in December.
Students could make both trips if they agreed to pay the
entire cost of the second trip. With the larger enrollment,
the department could no longer afford to pay for all
expenses for every student, so the students were asked to
contribute $500 each toward their trip. Everyone did so.
The September trip proved to be a huge success. The
goal was to build team spirit, meet the client, and begin
the project planning. The students from both schools
bonded well, and by the end of the week all the students
felt the students from both schools were committed to
the project, which was to improve the quality of
electronic patient journals for the Uppsala University
Hospital. Studies have shown that improving
interpersonal ties improves the collaboration on global
projects in industry [(Jarvenpaa and Leidner 1998),
(Majchrzak, Rice, King, Malhotra, and Ba 2000),
(Robey, Khoo, and Powers 2000)]. The course faculty
hoped that the collaboration between students could also
be improved, as well as giving the students exposure to
this aspect of team dynamics that would make them
amenable to it when they began their professional
careers. More details on how the team bonding was
accomplished are given in section 6.1.
When planning the project students were placed into
five teams, with each team having students from both
schools on it. A faculty advisor was assigned to each
team, who took part in weekly meetings of the team
(usually held by Skype). At the end of the project the
second trip by the Rose-Hulman students to Sweden
took place, and once again, the project was presented to
the IEEE education workshop (CeTUSS) and to the
client.
During the 2006 visit, the Rose-Hulman faculty
member (Laxer) mentioned to the Uppsala University
faculty member (Daniels) that he had a sabbatical
coming up the following year, and inquired if it would
be possible to spend the fall term at Uppsala University,
seeing the collaboration from the other side and working
to improve the collaboration for both sides. This was
well received, and for the fall 2007 the visiting
appointment took place. Another colleague at RoseHulman (Wollowski) taught the course at Rose-Hulman
while Laxer visited Uppsala.
This year the collaboration had a larger number of
students (about 40 in total) and undertook two projects,
an expansion of the SPEX project to several health
areas, and development of a web portal for the
rheumatics ward at the Uppsala University Hospital.
Students could decide which project they wanted to
work on, and each project attracted students from both
institutions.
During the semester Laxer interacted with the
Uppsala students in class and out. He gave several
lectures to the class, and served as a resource about the
Rose-Hulman students throughout the term. The
constant interaction proved welcome on both sides, and
certainly helped to make things run smoothly. Students
at Uppsala University were also asked to write weekly
reflections (in English) about topics chosen by all the
instructors. Asking them to think about different issues
associated with cross-cultural collaborations and project
work helped them remain focused on the project and the
collaboration. The instructors read the reflections and
provided feedback on them to the students. It is
anticipated that the reflections will be expanded to the
Rose-Hulman students next fall.
4
Issues in this Course
There are some key characteristics in the course that we
will highlight and discuss. Perhaps the two most
prominent aspects of the course are that it is based on
the use of open-ended, ill-structured, problems, and that
it involves two groups of students from two different
kinds of departments.
We will focus on a few particular issues in this
section. They are:
• Using real-world collaboration
• Promoting self-confidence
• Having international collaboration
• Avoiding detachment and estrangement
• Focus on process rather than product
Having a real client and a real project from an
interesting workplace, e.g. a hospital, is intended to lead
to high motivation and maximum exposure to the
benefits and challenges of international teamwork. It
also gives insights into a potential future profession and
provides opportunities to acquire valuable personal
skills related to a professional life. It furthermore
provides a connection between things learned in the
student’s education and its use in a real-world setting.
Part of dealing with a real-world setting is that clients do
not necessarily have a well-formulated problem in mind.
Rather, they know that information technology can help
them, but they do not know how it can help them. This
means that when students ask clients for more detailed
specifications, there are no “right” answers and that
settings and requirements can change during a project.
There is thus no single way to deal with a problem, nor
any obvious way to distinguish between what is relevant
and what is not. Dealing with such a setting and finding
ways to successfully address the problems that arise
leads to increased self-confidence about the capability to
take responsibility for solving problems in real-life. The
increased self-confidence and practice to select and
judge potential solutions will ease the transition to future
professions.
Part of the complexity in future employment will, for
many of our students, be the ability to work in an
international setting. Having experienced and mastered
problems with working in a multicultural environment
spanning several time zones and limited or no
opportunities for face-to-face meetings will be essential
in such settings. To have overcome the lure to become
detached and ineffective due to being overwhelmed by
complexity and lack of clear directions is another way to
build self-confidence. Having a focus on dealing with
the process rather than on the finished product is an
important part of dealing with open-ended, ill-structured
real-world problems.
These are some of the potentially good outcomes
from this course, but it is important to realize that the
students are not used to this form of education and that it
is important that they get an understanding of these
educational goals early on in the course. It is important
to realize that part of running such a course is to deal
with frustration and uncertainty. The students and
teachers should have an understanding of the role of the
teacher, and especially the fact that teachers are not
there to give answers. There are no easy solutions when
key people on the client side of the project are hard to
contact and meet with. Misunderstandings due to
cultural differences also pose problems that frequently
are difficult to solve, nor is there a best way to set up
and run a project. There is, however, learning to be
gained by reflecting on these issues and the faculty have
a role to inspire reflection as well as to give feedback on
choices and nudge students when they get stuck.
One of the key challenges of this course is to make
each member of the project feel like they are integral
members of the team. This is not always easy when
using real-world projects as opposed to carefully
controlled artificial projects. In this context we wish to
discuss the following issues:
• Differences in skill sets
• Language barriers
• Primary location of project
Rose-Hulman students are strong software
developers and typically learn by developing software
systems, whether through developing specifications or
by implementing to a specification. Real-world
problems do not always have those components. Some
projects are more concerned with usability than with
software development. Usability and issues in software
adaptation are part of Rose-Hulman’s software
engineering program and as such those kinds of projects
provide a valuable experience for Rose-Hulman
students. The students from Uppsala University are
typically from the Information Technology program and
for them, adaptability and usability studies are much
more central to their course of study. As such, for a
typical software development project, the skills sets
complement each other well. Naturally real-world
problems do not always have all of the components of a
software project; as such there is a risk of one set of
students being not as enamored with the project as the
other group.
Some projects require a good amount of interaction
with clients and users. If some project members do not
speak the language of the users and clients, then other
members need to be the eyes and ears for the entire
group. This is an interesting and useful experience for
all project members and possibly one of the best reasons
why students should be encouraged to participate in
projects with language barriers.
Each of these issues can be managed, if they occur
individually. However, if they co-occur, then there is the
risk that their compound effects alienate one of the
groups.
Up until now, clients for the course projects have
been associated with the university hospital at Uppsala.
This means that so far, Rose-Hulman students travelled
to Sweden to meet with their fellow students and the
clients at Uppsala. While those trips are enjoyed by
students from both institutions, it would be desirable to
create a situation where students visit each other’s
countries. The students from Uppsala expressed a desire
for such a state of affairs. Additionally, it would ensure
parity among the students from both institutions.
This goal is difficult to achieve with real-world
problems as the software, at this point, does not have
clients in Indiana. In principle, this should not be a
problem as one of the primary teaching hospitals in
Indiana has a rural health care program for communities
within a fairly large reach of Terre Haute. Contacts
should be made with the directors of these programs to
see about the possibilities of international collaboration.
As medical personnel are notoriously busy, this is a
formidable challenge. Thought should be given as to
project domains which offer both real-world problems
and an international scope. With a little bit of luck,
standardization and globalization of software
development and sales will provide for such
opportunities.
5
Pedagogical Development
Each university sets its own requirements for what
students can earn academic credit for. Thus, the courses
at each school under which the international
collaborative project is housed may be different,
especially when it comes to lecture material and class
discussions. The faculty involved in this project held
several discussions about what to cover in class
meetings; but, due to the differences in the students and
in class scheduling at each institution the two courses
were not identical. The following sections describe how
the courses have evolved at each school.
5.1
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
During the first two years of the collaboration, the
number of students allowed to participate in the project
was kept small (four per year) to maximize the chance
for success. The department had not undertaken an
international collaborative project before and had a lot to
learn. The course was run as a special topics course,
with the students and faculty member handling it more
like an independent study and undergraduate research
course than a lecture course. Rose-Hulman students
discussed in detail with the Uppsala University students
what the project requirements were, what they (the
Rose-Hulman students) needed to research and report
on, and how to get their results back to the students at
Uppsala.
It became apparent during those first two years that
the client for the projects tended to be the Uppsala
University Hospital, and thus the projects had a healthrelated theme to them. These projects provided
opportunities to face and discuss issues that are not
usually present in course-based projects, such as
information privacy concerns; ethical and legal matters,
especially between different countries; and software
safety, since harmful consequences to people could
occur if the software is not designed properly.
Beginning with the fall 2006 course offering,
enrollment was enlarged to twelve students. It was
decided to have weekly class meetings in which the
discussions mentioned above could take place. The
April 2006 issue of Computer magazine (Computer
2006) focused on engineering clinical software, and
provided many good articles to have the students read
and discuss. In particular, students were required to read
the articles on “Coping with Defective Software in
Medical Devices” (Rakitin 2006) and “High-Confidence
Medical Device Software and Systems” Lee, Pappas,
Cleaveland, Hatcliff, Krogh, Lee, Rubin, and Sha 2006),
which were then discussed in class meetings. The
project that year dealt with electronic patient journals,
and in a very timely way IEEE Spectrum published an
article on electronic medical records in its October 2006
issue (Charette 2006); this article was posted for
students to read as well.
As described earlier, the fall 2006 collaboration was
the first one in which the Rose-Hulman students made
two trips to Sweden. During the early one, in midSeptember, the students were asked to make three
presentations to the Uppsala University students and
faculty in a combined meeting of the two classes. These
presentations focused on (1) electronic patient journals,
the focus of the project that term, (2) the Therac-25
incident, to show what could go wrong with medical
software development, and (3) Rose-Hulman Institute of
Technology, so the Uppsala University students would
learn something about the school they were
collaborating with and the students that go there. These
presentations were very useful, and helped show the
Uppsala University students that the Rose-Hulman
students were fully committed to the project and the
collaboration, and that they would be valuable
colleagues in the collaboration. The Uppsala University
students also made presentations to the combined class.
For the fall 2007, the course was put in a
globalization context. Students were assigned readings
from Wikipedia, the book “Global Sociology” by Cohen
and Kennedy (Cohen and Kennedy 2000), and the report
from the ACM Taskforce on Globalization (Aspray,
Mayadas, and Vardi 2006). The book does a wonderful
job explaining the long history of globalization and
explains the benefits and drawbacks of it. If students see
themselves as part of this trend, they have a better
understanding of the power and limitations of
globalization, ultimately giving them the ability to take
advantage of it. Students were again asked to make
presentations to the combined class meeting during the
mid-September trip to Sweden.
5.2
Uppsala University
There was a change in the organization of the project
that occurred before the collaboration with RoseHulman Institute of Technology started that is relevant –
to have a large overall project with several connections
to real-world collaborators. The overall project is broken
down into subprojects and if a subgroup runs into
problems with getting access to the real-world client
they can potentially get a real-world experience through
the connections of another subgroup. Another change
that also occurred before the collaboration was to use
the hospital as the setting for the project. This provided
a client that all students readily agreed to spend time on
trying to improve the workplace for. The hospital
environment also provided an excellent example of
where IT is an important part of the workplace and yet
needs to be introduced with care.
Even though health care is an endeavor relevant to
both Sweden and the United States it is still difficult to
find projects where international collaboration can lead
to a clear benefit. It is also more difficult to collaborate
over the Atlantic Ocean than with local students. We felt
that it was important to make both the value of the
international collaboration tangible for our students, as
well as lower the threshold for active collaboration.
Face-to-face meetings were seen as an important
ingredient in this effort and funds were allocated to
support the stay for the Rose-Hulman students. Regular
group meetings were considered important and Skype
was introduced as a required media for weekly meetings
in 2006. Guest lectures by previous students that could
serve as role models for how to communicate in an
international setting were also introduced in 2006, and
in 2007 this was complemented with a guest lecturer
covering cultural aspects of collaboration, especially
between Sweden and the United States. Both of these
efforts have been seen as valuable and important among
the students, as evidenced by the students’ written
responses to reflective questions posed to them.
Up until now there have been more Swedish students
involved in the projects than American students and
some subgroups have been purely Swedish. There has
been an effort to have the mixed subgroups balanced
since we have seen that it is easy for a lone student to
become detached from the work of the group. More
detail on how we devise group membership is presented
in section 6.2.
We have also seen a tendency to view problems as
someone else’s, that if things do not go well it is due to
the other side or someone else in the group. Both the
open-endedness and the international component of the
course lend themselves to such thinking. Weekly
reflections were introduced in 2007 partly in order to
address this issue, by making each student reflect on
what problems they faced and what they personally
could do about it. This had a smaller impact than hoped
for, partly due to slow response from the teachers and
partly due to some issues not being relevant for all the
students. This will, in the 2008 course offering, be
addressed by having both general reflections and
subgroup specific reflections, with the general
reflections being given early and mid-way through the
project. The teachers involved in the 2008 course
offering will share the load of responding to the
reflections and the subgroup specific reflections will be
handled in the weekly group meetings instead of as
written individual responses.
It is not only collaboration between the students that
is difficult; there is also the matter of communication
among the faculty involved. Site visits and making
efforts to arrange face-to-face meetings (e.g. at
conferences) have been arranged. The issues have been
both about the collaboration in general as well as about
the actual projects.
Another issue that will be addressed in the next
instance of the course is the communication with the
client. There will be one main contact from the faculty
side. Communication between the students and the client
will be addressed by agreeing on when the students need
consent from the faculty member before agreeing to
something from the client.
6
Guidelines for International Student
Collaborative Projects
There are several aspects to international student
collaborative projects that should be considered to
maximize the chances for success and insure the
students get a meaningful educational experience. These
include how to build team camaraderie and trust, how to
manage the project work, and how to handle
communications.
6.1
Building Team Camaraderie and Trust
Team projects of all types require interaction among
people of varying backgrounds. It is important that team
members get to know one another and build a sense of
camaraderie and trust amongst themselves. This is easy
to do when all team members are in one physical
location. When teams comprise students from two
locations, in different countries, speaking different
languages, it becomes a more challenging task to build
that camaraderie and trust amongst the team members.
Thus, the faculty involved need to make efforts to
facilitate meetings between the students from the
schools involved. It is much more meaningful when the
students can meet in person, but this necessitates one
group of students making an international journey,
which has inherent costs – not just financial, but time
away from classes as well.
As mentioned earlier, throughout this collaboration
the project client has always been based in Uppsala,
Sweden, so it has made sense for the Rose-Hulman
students to travel to Sweden so they could meet their
counterparts as well as the client. The faculty involved
in teaching the courses at both institutions, as well as
senior academic administrators, all agree that learning
something about the country the project is being done in
and the culture of the people that live there is an
important part of this educational experience. Thus, the
visits to Sweden by the American students have always
included a day of cultural activities in addition to the
socializing with the Swedish students. The social
activities included formal and informal meetings in a
dedicated laboratory. Students enjoyed exchanging ideas
about the project, and were sharing personal
experiences. Other social activities contributing to
camaraderie included dinners and attending social
events in the evening.
The international travel aspect of this course is one
of the biggest reasons students are drawn to the course –
the Rose-Hulman students eagerly look forward to
meeting their Swedish counterparts and working with
them. Many of the Rose-Hulman students have not
travelled overseas before they took this course; going
with their fellow students and faculty member provides
an easy introduction to international travel for them.
Most of the students have remarked that they could not
wait to do further international travel, or to return to
Sweden.
During the first year of the collaboration one trip was
made to Sweden by the Rose-Hulman students; that
occurred at the end of the project, when an IEEE
education workshop (CeTUSS) was being held on the
Uppsala University campus and the presentation to the
client would occur. The faculty valiantly tried to arrange
some video conference calls early in the term for the
students to meet, but were unsuccessful in doing so. The
students introduced themselves via e-mail, and the
Angel Learning Management System at Rose-Hulman
was used for course collaboration. At the end of the
project, while the Rose-Hulman students and faculty
were in Sweden, there was a project debriefing amongst
the faculty and students from both institutions. Everyone
thought the first collaboration was successful. When
both sets of students were asked if a trip to Sweden early
in the term would have proven useful, both groups of
students said they did not think it was necessary. The
faculty listened to the students and for the following
year kept only one visit, at the end of the project.
At the end of the second year’s collaboration, the
faculty decided to try two visits to Sweden by the RoseHulman students for the following year. The faculty
wanted to see if the students getting to know each other
early, and working together early in the project would
lead to better team dynamics. The early trip occurred in
mid-September, about two weeks into the courses at
both institutions. Students at Uppsala University
arranged some ice-breaker and team-building exercises
that were very successful in building camaraderie and
trust among the two sets of students. Having the RoseHulman students in Sweden early on, meeting with the
client and working with the Uppsala University students,
also built a better sense of ownership in the
collaborative project for both sets of students.
Communication throughout the project between the
students of both schools was improved from prior years.
Both schools’ faculty members decided to keep the two
visits for the next year’s collaboration, and will continue
to keep them for subsequent collaborations. The
challenge will be to foster and support the interpersonal
contacts among the students between the two visits,
perhaps by arranging videoconference calls. It is cost
prohibitive for educational institutions to have
“managerial” (i.e. faculty) visits to the other location to
help motivate the team members, as is done in industry
(Oshri, Kotlarsky, and Willcocks 2008).
6.2
Project Management and Process
Open-ended group projects, such as those undertaken in
these collaborations, are large in scope. For the past two
years, there have been between 30 and 40 students total
to work on each project (10-12 from Rose-Hulman and
20-30 from Uppsala University). Under the guidance of
the course faculty, the students are asked to think about
the project and how it could be divided into component
parts, with each part having a small team (four to eight
students) working on it.
Once the project has been appropriately broken up
into smaller parts, students are asked to identify which
part they would like to work on. In the past, students
were very good at ensuring that each part of the project
had a sufficient number of students associated with it.
Students were also very good about ensuring that project
teams contained students from both schools. This is a
good indicator that students enjoy international
collaboration. It should be pointed out that due to the
nature of how a project is broken up, it may be prudent
for students of only one school to work on certain parts,
in particular those that require interaction with people
who only speak one language (although the
collaboration is done in English, and the Uppsala
University students speak English very well, many of
the Swedish people that get interviewed as part of the
research only speak Swedish). The course faculty insure
that each project sub-team has adequate and appropriate
student representation on it. Each sub-team is asked to
choose a leader, who is responsible for making sure that
sub-team’s work gets done in a timely manner. The team
leaders are also responsible for the communication
between sub-teams and with the course faculty. Each
sub-team is also assigned a faculty advisor.
The sub-teams are asked to meet at least weekly, and
to include their faculty advisor in the meetings.
Meetings that only involve students and faculty from
one school usually take place in person, in either the
project room or the faculty member’s office. When
students from both schools are involved, a computer
video chat program, such as Skype, is used to conduct
the meetings. People can choose to gather at one
location at each school to conduct the meeting, or can
choose to have a conference call and be at several
locations (this usually depends on the time of day and
obligations before or after the meeting).
Each sub-team is responsible for writing their part of
the project report (see next section). A report writing
team, comprised of a student from each sub-team, brings
together the individual parts of the report, adds the
appropriate introduction and conclusion sections, and
insures that the final report flows smoothly.
6.3
Handling Communications
Communication between team members of any project
is vital. When team members are located in different
countries that are several time zones apart it takes extra
effort to insure communication goes well.
The obvious first choice for communication is email. In addition to the students’ regular e-mail
accounts, each student had access to the e-mail service
included in the Angel Learning Management System at
Rose-Hulman. Within this system teams could be
formed, which permitted e-mail to be sent to all
members of that team. The instructors arranged “Angel
teams” that corresponded to each project sub-team, as
well as Angel teams for all students, just Rose-Hulman
students, just Uppsala University students, all faculty,
and everyone. The Angel e-mail system has an option to
forward Angel e-mail automatically to the user’s
internet e-mail address (so students wouldn’t need to log
in to Angel to see if they had Angel e-mail), and
everyone was encouraged to enable this option.
As mentioned earlier, Skype was used to conduct
team meetings when team members were located at
different locations. With web cameras being inexpensive
and Skype supporting video as well as audio, students
were encouraged to use web cameras so that they could
see each other while they were talking. Some teams
experimented with the use of cameras but found it
awkward to reposition the camera to the speaker. The
camera can instead be used to point to the whiteboard, in
case students wish to refer to materials developed there.
Students were also encouraged to use Skype between
meetings when they needed to talk to one or two other
people on their team (or anyone else in the course, for
that matter).
Written communication is an important component
of the courses. Students are required to produce a project
report that detailed the nature of the problem they were
solving, what research they undertook to understand the
problem and the needs of the client, what their results
were, the justifications for the approach they took, and
recommendations for further work. As this report is
typically very large, each project sub-team was
responsible for writing their portion of the report, as
well as contributing to the overall structure of the report
and to the sections that were not associated with a
particular sub-team. Small portions of the report were
typically written in Microsoft Word for sharing amongst
the sub-team members. Google Docs was used for
putting the whole report together and editing by the
report writing team. In general, students found Google
Docs useful to edit and distribute documents of various
natures.
7
Conclusion
Working on open-ended, international collaborative
projects is a challenging task for professionals, let alone
students, but the ability to do so is important in today’s
professional workplace. This paper has described the
evolution of a collaborative project between students at
Uppsala University in Sweden and Rose-Hulman
Institute of Technology in the United States. Students
have faced and successfully overcome the challenges of
working on ill-defined, open-ended projects for realworld clients and of collaborating with their peers in
another country and another culture, several time zones
away. During debriefings between the students and the
faculty at the end of each project the students reported
that although they were initially apprehensive about the
project and how it would proceed, they were proud of
what they accomplished and satisfied with what they
learned in the process. The faculty involved agree with
this assessment and are continuing to improve the
process for future collaborations.
8
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